Close Read: Once and Future Towers

That’s not fair: Dubai now has the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and our Freedom Tower is barely above the ground. Ours is years behind schedule; they only started building in Dubai in 2004, and the opening-ceremony fireworks went off today. (Ian Parker wrote about the building when it was still unfinished and called the Burj Dubai.) The Burj Khalifa has the world’s highest mosque and swimming pool. It is twice as tall as the Empire State building, with which, in terms of its historic moment, it may turn out to have a lot in common. The Empire State building was completed in 1931, a year that also saw a Hooverville go up in Central Park; the current economic crisis is not quite so deep, but the moment is, then as now, hardly propitious. Perhaps that makes the gesture all the grander, as one might argue it did in the case of what is now—again—the tallest building in New York. Maybe there is a way to make all that gleam in Dubai pay. Real estate is a funny business. Or maybe the Dubai tower will be filled with obscure travel agencies and import-export firms, and scaled by a giant gorilla.

Luckily, there was something in the news today for New Yorkers to be quite proud of: last Monday, the police academy graduated its latest class and, according to the Times, of two hundred and fifty new officers,

65 of them were foreign-born, hailing from 23 countries, the police said. Those officers spoke a total of 28 different languages, including Bengali, Punjabi, Yoruba and Creole.

The department as a whole is polyglot and diverse:

Of the 5,593 officers hired since July 2006, when the department began tracking the nationalities of police officers, 1,042 of them were foreign-born — hailing from 88 countries, according to department records.

And the traffic goes both ways:

The New York Police Department has sent its officers to 11 cities around the globe — even once dispatching a husband and wife to Abu Dhabi.

Next time they’re in Abu Dhabi, they can make a side trip to its neighboring emirate and see the Burj Khalifa.

The Times doesn’t mention the only member of the N.Y.P.D. to be killed on one of those overseas assignments: Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, who was assassinated, presumably by the Mafia, while on a secret mission to Sicily in 1909. A quarter of a million people showed up for his funeral back in Manhattan. There is a small but fascinating exhibit about Petrosino up at the New York Police Museum. Petrosino was a pioneering member of the Italian Squad—at the time, New York had about a hundred and fifty thousand Italian residents, and only a handful of Italian officers. You can’t fight crime if people can’t come into station houses and make themselves understood. Petrosino was, in a real way, the forebear of last week’s graduates.

Another jarring thing in the Police Museum is the video display in the room dedicated to the September 11th attacks. It’s in the corner, past the battered door of a police van and the photo of Officer Moira Smith leading a civilian to safety, just before she died, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter. The video is very well done, and will be timely in a hundred years, but watching it now the footage suddenly looked dated (that’s not quite the right word, but it’s close). It’s not yet on the scale of trying to focus on a Watergate documentary and wondering what the men were thinking with those sideburns and suits, or about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or why exactly it helped to have white gloves on in the summer. No one was wearing anything that, taken by itself, would stand out on the streets of New York today. But the conglomeration of small details—the parts in the hair, choices of shoes and coffee cups, what one might call, in sum, fashion—put the scene in a past time. When did that happen? It shouldn’t be surprising. Eight years have passed; Officer Smith’s daughter must be about ten, and perhaps thinking about fashion herself. We’ve waged two wars since and, with varying degrees of honesty, in the name of 9/11. But we haven’t finished with either of them—in the case of Afghanistan, we’re ramping up. Can we get our soldiers home before the time when we can’t look at the newscaster in the videos of September 11th without being puzzled by his tie?

And there’s another reason to be a proud New Yorker today—the Jets made the playoffs, by the skin of their teeth and with the help of a game thrown to them by the Colts. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the Steelers.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.